IA was wondering about Santa Clara County schools trustee Darcie Green, after noticing this tweet on Tuesday: “A month from my accident (the other driver was found 100%@ fault)& still getting a run around from #statefarm. #disapointed #NotAsAdvertised”

Darcie Green

We became worried when she missed Wednesday’s county board of education meeting, which she chairs. Some of her colleagues on the board didn’t expect her absence.

Green didn’t respond to our queries, despite once asserting to a reporter that she always tries to be responsive. (She ignored questions a week earlier about running for state Assembly against her ex-squeeze, San Jose Councilman Ash Kalra.)

But office of education spokesman Ken Blackstone said Green was merely out of town.

We’re hoping @darciegreen is #OK after her crash. And that she knows how to spell disappointed.

Richard Rodriguez has become synonymous with regime change in San Jose’s Luther Burbank School District, so his reappearance around the one-school district is making some folks nervous.

Last week he attended a closed board session on the superintendent’s evaluation. Board President Lorraine Garza explained. “His expertise is very valuable and economical” — because he’s not charging the district anything except mileage to and from his Gilroy home. She maintained that Rodriguez is merely “being a good citizen and helping the governing board in answering questions.”

But she reassured IA that Superintendent Michelle Richardson-Johnson’s evaluation was completed; last Tuesday the board was merely refining its evaluation process.

In the turmoil on the Mountain View Whisman School board, the district’s loss is turning out to be Khan Academy’s gain.

Chris Chiang

District board President Chris Chiang resigned last month to protest trustee Steven Nelson’s behavior, which Chiang said included harassing and intimidating employees, parents and others, and tying up board meetings. Chiang lamented that he and the board were powerless to fix things.

Now Chiang, who was an award-winning social studies teacher at Sacred Heart Schools in Atherton and Monta Vista High in Cupertino, has been snapped up by the online tutorial company Khan Academy. Chiang will help launch the Khan Lab School, an actual (rather than virtual) year-round, full-day school. It will offer a mixed-age program and learning through projects. Continue Reading →

Sniping and quarreling are taking no vacation in Morgan Hill Unified, even though the school board is on break until August. Earlier this month, Superintendent Steve Betando — who sends regular updates and FYI-type memos — suggested that the board hire an attorney to, it seems, look into the actions of trustee Gino Borgioli.

Steve Betando

Borgioli’s trespass, allegedly expressed in an email to three parents, wasn’t immediately clear from Betando’s puzzling three-sentence note that read in part, “As you can may realize, his act may have serious legal implications for the District and Board. I recommend that the Board immediately engage in legal council separate from counsel that I would recommend.”

Borgioli had written the email in late June, which he said was in response to parents’ questions about district issues, including

Gino Borgioli

administrator moves, grade-level configuration and what he claimed was a push by Betando and board President Bob Benevento to shrink the school board from seven to five members.

Trustee David Girard fired off an email noting the grammatical and spelling mistakes and wondering about the soundness of Betando’s judgment. Girard added, “I again question your reflexive resort to lawyers as the response to everything that does not meet your expectations or needs.” He recommended Betando “take a deep breath” and simply call Borgioli “before recommending that we engage in a ‘legal council.'” Girard even offered to mediate.

In the recent settlement of a lawsuit against the Evergreen School District over the molestation of children by a second-grade teacher, it’s fairly clear who lost: The district has agreed to pay $15 million to the families of four girls and their lawyers, led by Bob Allard of San Jose. The family of another child separately won $1.5 million.

It’s harder to sort out who pays in this case. It’s not the district, whose settlement will be covered by insurance. Continue Reading →

Rancor has exploded at the top of the Morgan Hill Unified School District, with Superintendent Steve Betando and trustee Rick Badillo butting heads in bitter disputes. The issues are multiple — charter schools, education of Latinos, personal behavior, access to information, for starters — and appear to be multiplying.

Steve Betando

Differences between Badillo, Betando and fellow trustees grew so intense that police were called to a May 26 board meeting.
Until November, Badillo was at the losing end of 6-to-1 votes, including one elevating Betando to chief. Badillo, the lone non-white on the board, had been the sole supporter of charter schools aimed particularly at Latinos, who make up about half the district’s students. Since last year’s election, he’s gained two allies who question district leadership.

With its office of education facing its biggest crisis in recent history, the Santa Clara County Board of Education appears to have crawled into a bunker.

For a month since the arrest of Edgar Covarrubias-Padilla on child pornography charges, frantic and anxious parents have wondered how a suspected child molester got access to their children, who might have been victimized and how future threats could be prevented at Walden West environmental camp, run by the county office of education.

When public officials try to sneak in decisions and deliberations in secret, it’s usually the public or press pounding on the door. But in the Morgan Hill Unified School District, insiders and another school agency are crying foul.

Maribel Medina

In April, the Morgan Hill board decided to sue the Santa Clara County Board of Education over its approval of Voices Morgan Hill charter school, which is now slated to open in August.

In its vote on the suit, the Morgan Hill board violated California’s open-meetings law, argued Maribel Medina, general counsel for the county office of education. She contended that Morgan Hill failed to agendize the Voices vote on its April 21 meeting and to announce its decision to sue afterward. In a May 19 letter, she

Steve Betando

demanded the school district withdraw its lawsuit.

That’s unlikely to happen. In his reply, Morgan Hill Superintendent Steve Betando disagreed with Medina’s contention that the alleged lapse invalidates the lawsuit.

More recently, Morgan Hill schools officials failed to post their May 26 school board agenda in its usual place on the district website. Trustees Rick Badillo, Gino Borgioli and David Gerard protested and argued that the school board should cancel the meeting, which they called illegal. Continue Reading →

After months of reflection, a sixth-grader at San Martin/Gwinn school in San Martin decided in December she no longer would recite the Pledge of Allegiance with her class. For a while, only her friends and kids around her noticed.

Then her teacher got upset and repeatedly pulled the student out of class to interrogate her. The teacher called the child’s mother.

So powerful are teachers unions in California that school board members and administrators seldom speak out against them — for fear of retaliation at the ballot box, or trouble at the bargaining table or friction in their work days.

So when a Los Angeles Superior Court judge last year declared that the state’s system for evaluating, laying off and granting tenure to teachers was not only broken but unconstitutional, many educators may have nodded their heads but muted their cheers. The state Department of Education and teacher unions are appealing the ruling.

More than 400 retired educators in the Bay Area received annual pension payouts of $100,000 or more in 2014, according to the budget watchdog group Transparent California.

Three South Bay and Peninsula ex-superintendents received the highest payout among Bay Area educators. James Smith, former chief of the Evergreen Elementary District in San Jose, received $287,434; Marilyn Miller, formerly of the four-school Hillsborough district, received $280,035; and Johanna Vandermolen, retired from the Campbell Union Elementary District,

Johanna Vandermolen

received $278,003.

Interestingly, all three of the former elementary school chiefs received more than retired heads of the area’s big school districts, although in some cases only slightly. Last year, in retirement from San Jose Unified, Don Iglesias took in $239,492. He led a district more than 20 times the size of Hillsborough. Continue Reading →